Yesterday Robbie Swan and I attended the ballot draw for Bradfield and Higgins respectively.
The ballot draws decide the order that the candidates appear on the voting form.
It is quite an event and process. The returning officer gives a speech that sounded like it needed a bell and a hear yee hear yee at the beginning. A double random system is used. Australia is apparently the only country that does this.

First a staff member is blindfolded and she pulls out numbers from a bingo ball cage. Each candidate is issued a number. The balls are then put back in the cage and drawn again and that decides the order. In Higgins I was given number 8 in the first and 8 was the second ball drawn in the second draw so I am number 2 on the Higgins voting sheet. An independent called John Murphy is 1st and the Liberal Keely O'Dwyer is 3rd. There are 10 candidates in all.
In Bradfield there are over 20 candidates and Zahra is number 10 on the ticket Fred Nile is running 9 candidates and one of the them drew the first spot.

Most of the candidates attended the event and most were very freindly. The 72 year old Hungarian immigrant who is standing for one nation couldn't stop giggling when I told him where I was from. Clive Hamilton from the Greens tried to avoid me but I caught him. There was a bit of media there and we brought cupcakes which at first totally confused the Electoral Commission but in the end they all thought it was hilarious and most people had one.

Usually we spend the day and part of the evening of Wednesday setting up the show, having a few quiet (sometimes not so quiet) drinks/dinner with all our colleagues who have flown in for the show and then try and get a good sleep before the 4 day show begins. This show we thought, why not add a black tie dinner and film festival into the mix? So the dynamos Sarah Flynn and Emma Wilson went to work. Invites to submit films were sent, invites to attend the dinner were posted and the logistics of holding a dinner in the middle of Sexpo bump in, when traditionally forklifts and cherry pickers are still operating, were overcome.

We also had to overcome the challenge of holding an erotic film festival ina state where making erotic films is illegal. ( My speech on this is in an adjoining blog)

20 mins before the doors opened for the gala dinner Rebecca Lanning, Anne Watson Anna Van Reil, Emma, Sarah and I got changed in back office in under 10 minutes using a pocket mirror to apply make- up, check for VPL and droopy boob. It was pretty impressive that we all managed to look so glamourous. Although Sarah's gorgeous black silk long dress was kept well hidden behind a desk calling the show. Emma, in a bespoke chiffon and silk number looked like she had been dressed by a team of stylists.

Yes it was madness but as they say it was alright on the night. The evening included cocktails, very good food and brilliant stage design by Produce Now who staff donated their time for the event. There were stunning performances from the new candidate for Bradfield, Zahra Stardust and the world star Suzie Q with her extraordinary partner Toby. (See picture gallery) Kissing languidly while hanging from a rope a few metres from the ground and holding onto very little is an amazing skill and no doubt they will soon be taking the world by storm.

WIth international stars Sasha Gray and Monica Mayhem (actually she is one of us- just more famous in the US) there the evening had a real red carpet feel to it.

Russell Gilbert rounded the evening's entertainment by auctioning off some mighty fine wines including a Grange and a1982 Claret.

There were some great short films and we will be announcing the winner at Melbourne Sexpo. I don’t if it is my age but I really enjoyed watching the 1922 film Free Ride.

A few drinks to wind down after the show and then up bright and early Thursday to start Sexpo. Once we had found our stand and had it flown in from Melbourne and all of our printing couriered from Penrith we were ready to go except that it was after 7pm by then, so straight to the Fox and Lion for few drinks with Sex party members. Oh and we also had to find Sarah's voice. We didn’t actually find that until Saturday, the poor thing had a terrible case of Laringitis.

Once everything was in place the show went swimmingly. Another couple of hundred members joined up and a few keen men had their members temporarily tattooed. We also tattooed breasts, bums and even a pair of testicles.

A new phrase, eat a dick, was made into a song by the fabulously musical Anne Watson and it is estimated that the phrase was heard 1,846,665 times during the show.

Sunday featured an Alpha girl catch up to raise some money for the party.

Hamilton’s nannying attitudes are contained in his 2003 Australia Institute report called Regulating Youth Access to Pornography. Notwithstanding the problems of young boys wanting to seek out sexually explicit images on line, Hamilton reaches straight for the banning button as a way to solve the problem. Not only that, he went as close as you can get to calling for an all out ban on X rated films. He even went so far as to support the philosophies of fundamentalist feminists Dworkin and McKinnon that, ‘pornography is the theory, rape is the practice’.

The Greens have been looking at ways to make themselves more mainstream for quite a while now and the idea of co opting someone with Hamilton’s profile makes some sense. But Hamilton is so far left that he almost comes full circle and to the right of the right.

He has called for mandatory internet filters, new laws governing department store catalogues and he even weighed into the Bill Henson debate calling on greater control of the arts

There were aetheist societies, gay and lesbian groups, pagan groups and a couple of others who defied definition. Watching in amazement from the sidelines were a dozen or so Sex Party members. All were equally pissed off that groups like Catch the Fire have managed to gain serious influence in the federal parliament.

Some of the confrontations between young lesbians and old Christians were very tense and neither side gave ground in their belief. At times the speaking in tongues and the opposing chants threatened to boil over into a full on brawl but both sides seemed aware of a virtual line that had been drawn and no one crossed it.

Pastor Danny Nalliah roused his troops like a circus master. He looked like the head waiter on the Love Boat in his white Nehru jacket with gold buttons and black trousers. He wielded a megaphone like a union organiser. I’m sure he was who Frankie Goes to Hollywood had in mind when they penned Two Tribes – ‘Cowboy No. 1/ A born-again poor man's son/ On the air America/ I modelled shirts by Van Heusen /(working for the black gas) yeah. ‘

There were cosmic and spooky events too. Pastor Danny had said before the event that he would ‘remove the dark clouds that hang above Parliament’. As Saturday morning dawned the weather bureau forecast a fine day however as Pastor Danny and his followers started speaking in tongues he seemed to hex himself somewhat as a storm moved in from the Brindabellas and quickly caused a big black cloud to develop over Lake Burley Griffin and Parliament House! Although only a few drops fell on Mt Ainslie, the effect was stunning. And whether it was a witch’s spell or whether it was Pastor Danny’s reverse pike with triple somersault that caused it, three old crows descended on top of the communications tower and stayed there for at least an hour.

The event really came out of nowhere. No one expected anything like it. Although the Christians were outnumbered two to one, Pastor Danny must have been delighted with the theatrics of the day. There were also clear messages for Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull and possibly even Bob Brown. Gay and lesbian people are ready to take Mardi Gras into the federal parliament if gay marriage and other social equity issues are not met. Rationalists in the community are now ready to take on the archbishops and the Imams whenever they see religious agendas masquerading for moral legislation.

Summing up the way in which each of the four commented on the Sex Party, Matt Abraham’s comments were all negative. David Bevan’s and Chris Pyne’s were roughly evenly divided and Chris Schacht was pretty much defending the rights of the party all the way through. Chris Schacht was a champion of free speech and civil liberties during the Hawke and Keating administrations, so its not surprising that he would be positive about a new civil liberties party no matter where its roots lay.

Matt Abraham made four comments during the segment – all of them quite negative. Shouldn’t he be even handed on issues like this you ask? Not on your life…. Abraham has an agenda here that he’s not telling his listeners about. He’s one of an increasing number of political journalists in this country who are also very committed Christians but who fail to declare their personal bias when commenting on sex, censorship, abortion, euthanasia etc. I am certain that Michael Atkinson feels safe when interviewed by Abraham especially on R rated computer games.

Not only is Matt Abraham one of the Catholic church’s main media men, he was also instrumental in bringing Contempt of Parliament charges against myself and Robbie Swan in 1996. Abraham sought out an interview with us in that year over comments we had made elsewhere about a Coalition backbencher and his wife who had been caught on a security camera in a Canberra adult shop purchasing X rated films. Nothing wrong with that you say, except that the next day, the backbencher was due to vote in a Joint Party Room meeting to endorse a ban on X rated videos. Knowing that he was going vote for the ban, we cried hypocrisy and called on the MP to resign or risk being ‘outed’. Our rationale was that elected members had no right to tell the electorate one thing via their policies but to do the opposite in their own lives. If every MP did this the nation would soon become so cynical of politicians that the institution of Parliament would be severely damaged. We had no intention of naming the politician ourselves but wanted to put pressure on him to out himself.

During the interview on Matt Abraham’s radio program, he was much more aggressive and combative about the issue than you would normally expect from an ABC interviewer. Through a series of cleverly orchestrated questions he finally got Robbie to say that he thought it would be in the public interest for the backbencher to be identified and to account for his behaviour. Not long after this we received a summons from the Privileges Committee of the federal parliament stating that the comments made on Abraham’s program were enough for two Contempt charges to be laid against us. The specific charge was ‘threatening a member of parliament in the line of their duty’ and if found guilty, we could be placed in custody ‘at her Majesty’s pleasure’.

How was this was possible when we had not even identified the MP in question? Apparently this didn’t matter. The fact that we had said we might out any MP over this issue was enough to scare all of them and put them off their game and that constituted a contempt.

In the end we were found not guilty of the contempt but in summing up, the Priviliges Committee found that if we did the same thing again then we would be found guilty. Work that one out if you can.

However the most galling point of the whole episode was that we felt Abraham had set us up by not declaring his strongly held religious affiliations and beliefs - which clearly included a profound dislike of X rated films and an even greater dislike of the industry that produces them.